People and process first
Everyone knows the phrase "people, process, technology." It gets trotted out in every transformation pitch deck. And then everyone ignores the order and starts with the technology anyway.
It's understandable. Technology is tangible. You can procure it, implement it, put it on a roadmap. It feels like progress. Meanwhile, "sort out the people and process" sounds vague and slow. So the organisation buys the platform, configures it to match how things work today, and calls it transformation.
Except nothing has transformed. You've just digitised the existing mess.
The sequence matters because technology should encode decisions you've already made about how work flows and who does what. If you haven't made those decisions yet, the technology makes them for you, badly, by forcing people into whatever workflow the vendor assumed. Then you spend the next two years building workarounds for a system that doesn't match how your organisation actually operates.
I've seen this play out the same way in health, justice, and transport. A new system arrives. People adapt around it rather than through it. The process stays the same but now takes more clicks. Someone builds a shadow spreadsheet because the system doesn't capture what they actually need. Eventually the organisation concludes the technology was the wrong choice, when really the problem was that nobody defined the process it was supposed to support.
The fix is unglamorous. Before you write a single requirement for a new system, answer two questions. What are people actually doing today, and what should they be doing instead? The gap between those two answers is your process work. The technology exists to close that gap, not to define it.
This doesn't mean technology comes last. It means technology comes after you've understood the problem well enough to know what you're asking it to do. Sometimes that takes weeks. Sometimes months. It always takes longer than people want, and it's always faster than reworking a system you bought too early.